"Do you want to know what it is?" the doctor asked, gliding the sonogram wand over my belly.
"Yes."
"It's a girl," he said, smiling.
"A girl?"
"Yes."
It wasn't that I didn't want a girl. I didn't know what I wanted. But I had assumed she was a he. I felt shaken, psychically blindsided. I didn't see it coming. It was good news. I was having a baby; the baby was healthy; the baby was a girl. Double X. XXX OOO, hugs and kisses — mom. It took me weeks to get used to the idea. I wasn't even sure what exactly the problem was — and then I realized. My mother. I was afraid that I wasn't just giving birth to a baby girl, but that the baby girl would be my biological mother. I pictured my daughter being born: fifty years old, her hair in a beehive, smoking some sort of extra-long, mentholated lady cigarette and clutching a glass of Harvey's Bristol Creme. I was having flashbacks of the day my recently discovered biological mother implored me, "You should adopt me and take care of me."
My answer was, "No. That's not possible." What if the baby was like my mother? What if she was crazy, wild, impossible to please? What if I hated her?
I was a wreck — imagining an infant Linda Blair in my belly, imagining something akin to a gremlin with a vague physical resemblance to myself. A girl. I thought of all the girls I hated growing up, girls who were mean to me, girls who were catty, bitchy, who made a point of not including me and letting me know, girls who were too cool, girls who were too perfect, girls who everyone liked. The fact was, I kind of hated girls.
I thought of myself as a former girl child. I was awful. I screamed at my (adoptive) mother. I swore at her, railing day and night against everything and anything. "I will not wear this, I will not go to school, you can't make me and I'm going to prove it." Punk rock may well have been named after me. "I am an anarcaster . . ." My mother would try and wrestle me into clothes and out the door and would finally give up crying. "I hope one day you have a little girl who is just like you," she would say. "I hope I do," I'd spit back, defiantly. I was not a good girl, was not a pleasant girl and often would have sworn I wasn't even a girl.
When I told my mother I was pregnant, she was horrified. "It's very difficult raising children, " she said, as though somehow, in retrospect, she thought we hadn't turned out okay. And still defiant, I said, "I'm not worried. " I was lying.
As my belly grew bigger and the idea more familiar, I got more comfortable with the fact that my baby was a girl. After all, if I played my cards right, maybe my apartment wouldn't really end up filled with pink toys and Barbie dolls.
Before she was born, I had another odd moment, thinking, What if she's bald? I couldn't imagine having a bald child. I had been born with a full head of hair — thick hair that stood straight up, like a rocket ship launching. I couldn't imagine bonding with a bald baby. Just thinking about it, I had visions of Dancing Baby Cha-Cha, the animated internet infant in a diaper who wiggled in weird ways. I said nothing, but a few weeks later the obstetrician, with his sono wand again in hand, pointed to something on the screen: "See that circle around her head?" "Yes," I said, worried. Was he was going to tell me something was wrong? "That's hair," he said, "She's got hair." I sighed, priorities corrected, glad that nothing was wrong and secondarily that she wasn't bald.
And so she arrived. We met briefly in the delivery room before she was whisked away. She seemed quite nice: beautiful, sweet, blue-eyed, easygoing. Having finally met her in person, was I still afraid? You bet. Was I more afraid? With every new development came new fear. If I was not more afraid then I was differently and increasingly worried. At first, you worry about their survival, and then whether they're normal, and then about keeping them safe, warm, dry, well-fed and not letting them fall off the changing table, and then not choking, not putting forks in the electric outlets, and so on. You baby proof — knowing there is really no such thing as baby proofing. They start to walk, to run, to talk — to understand what you are talking about — and you teach them to stay on the sidewalk, to wait for the walk signal, to look both ways, not to run after the ball that rolls into the street. You worry about the world they live in — will it be a safe place, will it still exist? What will her generation be witness to?
I blink, and she is bigger, now three-and-a-half. And am I still scared of her? Absolutely. She scares me both because she reminds me of me, and because she is different from me. I know how her mind works, and I have no idea what she's thinking.
She terrifies me because she thinks she can fly like Angela Ballerina. She believes she can do anything; she wants to be a kite like Flat Stanley, she acts like Curious George — climbing from her bed, across the window sill to get something off my dresser — graceful, balanced, but terrifying. Another day, I spotted her dragging a chair from the living room into the bathroom and followed her. I found her unlocking the medicine cabinet. Why? Because she needed to get Band-Aids.
The only time I've spanked my daughter was when I saw her just about to drop something out the window — which, of course, has window guards, but still . . . "Don't do it," I said. "Don't drop anything out that window. It's very dangerous. You could hurt someone." Admittedly it was only a piece of paper that she wanted to drop out the window, but still . . . She smiled. "Come away from the window," I said. Her eyes sparkled mischievously. She giggled. Her hand crept closer to the open window. She slipped the paper out the window and let it go. "It's flying," she said. "See, it's flying. It can fly." I charged across the room and slapped her bottom. She didn't cry but looked at me, baffled, as if to say, "What did you do that for?" "We don't throw things out the window. No, no, no. That's a time out — a really big time out." I live in terror of her trying it herself — her greatest dream is to achieve flight. I have strange flashbacks to hearing about the death of Art Linkletter's daughter, who, in 1969, threw herself out her apartment window, reportedly while on LSD.
I put my daughter on the sofa and told her to sit. She giggled again — once more reminding me of myself. "But it flew, it really flew."
Fascinated by matches, by fire, as was I, my daughter is always asking us to light candles, to play birthday party. Recently, with another adult supervising, she leaned headlong into a Play-Doh cake with ten candles burning and singed her hair. The apartment was instantly filled with that particular burnt-hair smell. I came running. "Are you all right? Are you sure you're all right?" I asked again and again, while checking her hair to be sure she was not in flames.
And as though it's not enough to worry about the violence, the difficulty the world will present her with, I have to worry about what she might do to herself. In that way, we — my biological mother, my daughter and myself — are alike. We are dramatic and impulsive — or were, I should say, since my biological mother died unexpectedly at sixty on her sofa, having refused medical treatment for kidney disease. And like her mother and biological grandmother, my daughter does not hear the word "no" easily. Having grown up in a family where the adults set no limits, I firmly believe that children need limits. They need to know that someone is in charge, and that is one of my jobs. "No, you may not watch television all day. No, you may not go out in the snow wearing a tutu. No, you may not have candy for breakfast." What I have learned is that with her, a flat-out "no" doesn't work. I have to work with her, to win her. I have to think strategically to get her on my side. "Don't you think it might be chilly on your legs to go out into the snow with just a tutu on? Don't you think your legs might say, 'Oh, please put some pants on! I'm freezing'? How about we put your pants on over your tutu, and you can wear tutu pants?"
She loves a good negotiation. "It's late tonight," I say, "We're just going to read one book and then get right to bed." "How about three?" she asks. "Three?" "This many." She holds up four fingers. "Please." "Two books," I say. "Oh, Mommy, please," she says, as though you didn't understand the urgency of the first request. Like I don't understand, like it is really of great importance that we read three books. Life will never be the same if I say no — and, of course, it will never be the same if I say yes.
I imagine trying to reason with her later — when she's eight, thirteen, seventeen and twenty-three. How do I teach her to have good judgment, to care what others are doing — to do what is right for her? How do I make instinctive that she shouldn't drive drunk, shouldn't drive with anyone she thinks is drunk, shouldn't drive at all late at night when other drivers are drunk? How do I tell her not to talk to strangers — when all she does is talk to strangers? And what about boys — men!
She already loves men. From the time she was six months old, she's been flirting with waiters, and is, in fact, not happy if men don't pay attention to her. "Matt," she called out like a two-and-a-half-year-old Mrs. Robinson when our beloved dog walker arrived. "Matt, come and see me! I'm in the bathtub." She craves a very specific kind of attention from men. She knows they are different. She knows they are something she wants. They are strong and can pick her up and swing her through the air — she is giddy when she gets them to engage.
Am I going to be one of those parents who say, "If you must do it, do it at home? Better in my house — where at least I know what's going on — then somewhere else where I don't"? What am I going to say to her about birth control, about safe sex? What will that mean — a decade from now?
She is a girl who wakes up in a good mood. She starts her day saying, "I so happy — you so happy?" She is excited about her life — her future. She has already decided that when she grows up she will be a ballerina. When her class was discussing what happens in the rainforest, she raised her hand and announced, apropos of nothing, that when she grows up she will be a ballerina and that everyone in the class was invited to see her perform. I live in fear of her being unhappy, of my doing things as a parent that will undermine her, that when she's older she will be unhappy and it will be my fault.
"Hold me," she says in the middle of the night, and I do. And I imagine what she will be like, years from now, as someone's partner and as someone's mother.
"I'm not a child anymore," she told me this morning. She is wrong. She is three-and-a-half and has a long way to go. She spent the morning wearing a fleece, full-body Winnie-the-Pooh costume and said she couldn't have eggs for breakfast because, "Winnie-the-Pooh only eats honey and could I have a jar of honey, please. Please!"
"Mommy, I love you," she says out of the blue and she wraps herself around me and she is so small and every bit as perfect as I could desire. From the moment we first met, I could not imagine her as anything different from what she is — a most beautiful girl.